In late 2014 Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) hosted a roundtable to discuss the challenge of making open access work. The event brought together a group of academic institutions from the United Kingdom and publishers from the US and UK to examine the implications of the rapid growth of open access publishing. Those present focused in particular on the challenges surrounding the payment of article processing charges (APCs) and on the role vendors such as CCC can play in addressing these challenges. The group's findings were published in the January 2015 report, "Making Open Access Work for Authors, Institutions and Publishers."
My magazine reading is almost exclusively limited to what's offered in my Next Issue subscription. If you're not familiar with Next Issue, it's an all-you-can-read e-zine service featuring more than 140 titles. Sports Illustrated, BusinessWeek and Wired are just a few of the magazines I read in my $14.99/month subscription.
I used to buy ebooks from Amazon but now I read almost exclusively on Oyster Books. Years ago I subscribed to a bunch of magazines and now I read all but one of them through Next Issue (The Week is the only exception). It wasn't that long ago that I bought CDs and music tracks but now I'm mostly streaming through Spotify.
Since I've wholeheartedly embraced the content rental model, what's preventing me from dumping Oyster for Scribd, Next Issue for Zinio or Spotify for Rdio?
As Ralph Lazaro VP of digital products at Findaway World aptly pointed out during a panel session yesterday at the Digital Book World Conference, the conversation around digital publishing tends to get hijacked by ebooks. It's easy to forget that audiobooks should be part of the digital discussion.
The Pew Research Center released a report last year called Digital Life in 2025. You'll find a summary of it here and the downloadable PDF is here. I should point out that the report is now almost a year old, but since the vision is for ten years out, it's still quite relevant and an interesting read
Because the industry moves at a glacial pace I don't think we're likely to see any earth-shattering breakthroughs in 2015. What I do think we'll see are some seeds of change being planted and a few of the next steps in the industry's evolution.
With that in mind, here are five important developments I expect to see in 2015 and beyond:
Have you ever heard the quote, "everything that can be invented has been invented"? It was once believed that a U.S. Patent Office commissioner uttered those words but that claim has since been refuted. Regardless of whoever said (or didn't say) it, I'm convinced it's a view many in the publishing industry strongly believe in.
The cost of scanning, converting, and digitizing content seems to decline every year. As a result, we're seeing all sorts of print archives being converted to digital products. The problem is that too many publishers are applying the "if you build it, they will come" approach to these archives.
Simply creating the digital archive might be good enough for a small market of professional researchers, but it will never attract the larger consumer audience; flipping virtually flipping through stacks of old content loses its appeal fairly quickly.
Over the past decade, publishers have admirably pivoted toward digital content production, creating ebooks, apps, and even video to accompany their traditional print offerings. But by in large, publishers have not adopted an expansive media role-book publishing is still the core business. Electric Yarn, a self-styled "next generation content studio," takes a different approach.
If you're overly concerned about data privacy you'll want to stop reading right now because I'm about to give you a glimpse of the future that will make you bristle.
For the rest of you, I'd like to describe a vision I have of how content services will dramatically improve, become widely used, and even paid for, in the not too distant future.
